Esports betting – Get the Best Odds at Esports

Making Money on eSports Betting

Let me tell you a little story. It is a story that should give all potential eSports betting enthusiasts hope.

I was looking for an example match to talk about in this article, and there was only one about to fire off: A DOTA2 match between Calamity King and Phoenix Gaming, as part of the WCAA Winter Challenge Cup.

Three different eSports betting places had set their odds twenty minutes in advance:

Ten minutes out it looked like this:

Five minutes out:

This is utter chaos. Particularly when you consider that the game was forfeited 15 minutes before the start time, and only one site noticed.

But even if that wasn’t the case, look at the odds differences between the three sites. The massive shifts before start time. This sort of thing is all too common in the world of eSports betting. Traditional sports bookies have no idea how to handicap these matches, and often overreact to seemingly minor news.

Could you imagine seeing this before a major boxing match, with no significant change in the athletes’ health status? Or in football with no roster or condition changes? It would be unheard of.

But to the eSports bettor, chaos in setting and holding a line isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity.

Successful eSports Betting Means Using the Chaos

These wild, chaotic swings in the odds can help you to beat the Vig. And beating the Vig is everything.

As strange as it sounds, winning or losing one individual bet is meaningless. Constantly picking and placing the bet with the best chance to overcome the house’s built in advantage is what will make you the most money in eSports betting.

Look at the betting odds tables again. Add up the ‘win’ percentages on both sides. Notice that they all add up to about 107%, not 100%?

That’s because the house adds a small percentage to make sure that on a close call, they still make money. This is the ‘house edge’ or the ‘Vigorish’... also known as the Vig.

You can use a two-way odds converter to figure out what they think the real odds are. Let’s use the earliest projections from ‘Site 1’ as an example. Without that 7% house margin, they should be offering you 7.45 (13.42%) for the underdogs and 1.15 (86.58%) for the favored team. That’s what they think each team’s real winning chances are.

Your job as an eSports bettor is to make wagers where you think the true odds not only beat the line that the house presents, but also covers their Vig. If they’re taking around 3.5% from each side of the equation, you’re only laying bets where you think their calculations are off by 4% or more. Hopefully a lot more.

Once again, take the example above, the earliest projections. You see one site telling you that Calamity King only has a 16.9% chance to win their DOTA2 match, while the other sites are offering odds based on a 37% win chance.

Let’s say you believe the other two sites. In other words, you think team Calamity King will win about one third of the time, not one sixth. If ‘Site 1’ is off by 20%, that more than covers their Vig. You should place the bet.

You shouldn’t have loyalty to any ‘preferred’ betting site (as long as you trust all of the ones you’re looking at to pay out). Nor should your loyalty to any individual team impair your judgement. This is purely a mathematical decision.

And it doesn’t matter that you’re likely to lose the bet two out of three times. What matters is the value if you win. If you place a similar bet three times and win once, you’ve paid $30 to win $59.10. Of course that’s not guaranteed to happen because of variance. But with consistency and proper bankroll control, eventually the Law of Large Numbers should take over. Which means if you’re really only making bets with true odds that beat the house edge, you should be winning in the long run.

A value betting calculator can help you to figure out if your EV% beats the Vig. If the house is allowing you to lay bets at 5.91 (16.9%), but you think the real odds are closer to 37%, then your EV is 118.7%. That obliterates the Vig. In fact, it’s possibly something that we call an ‘arbitrage opportunity’... but that’s a topic for another day.

In short: By monitoring the wild odds swings that seem to be more common in the eSports betting arena, you can take back the advantage. It means being vigilant, monitoring multiple trusted betting sites, and making good judgement calls when there’s a significant difference between the markets.

Conclusion

The best way to make money with eSports betting is taking advantage of the flaws and uncertainties of the betting sites themselves. With more experience, you’ll figure out which eSports certain sites predict well, and which ones they get a little bit wild with. Use a site’s reliable, accurate eSports odds to police the unreliable ones.

Remember to never use numbers off of a site that you don’t trust. That includes any brand new sites. If you have doubts that you could withdraw your money safely, they are not a real source of information. At all. They can offer any line they want if they never intend to pay out, right?

Until next time, remember to do your research, use technology to your advantage, and exercise responsible bankroll management at all times.

The odds on Esports is in the menu to the left.